Michigan's Streamlined Performance Program
June 04, 2019 by Melissa Crowe
Photo credit: Dane / Flickr
State government leaders face critical decisions on investing public resources and ensuring agencies and officials are accountable for how they spend taxpayer dollars.
The State of Michigan takes an innovative approach through its Open Performance program. This strategy makes available cross-agency operational and financial data, visible via automated dashboards, to support leaders in the decision-making process.
It's been a five-year journey from building and manually updating static visualizations on its first dashboard — "The Michigan Dashboards" — to the streamlined and sustainable version the public sees today, which includes 100 outcome measures and millions of rows of open data.
The State of Michigan Office of Good Government is a Tyler Excellence Award winner for its use of the Socrata data platform. Read more on this government's data journey:
How did the Office of Good Government execute the overall project?
Over the past five years, more than 20 departments at the State of Michigan have shared performance information with the Office of Good Government. The primary data collection method for our open performance projects has been the institution of departmental scorecards. We then use much of this scorecard data to build cross-department outcome measures and showcase what our departments are doing to resolve key issues in our state.
One of the key challenges for implementing a cross-agency solution has been sharing cross-agency data through a central location. Socrata's ability to grant differently leveled permissions and allow users to take ownership of their data, while partnering with our Socrata experts, was key to our success. We were able to work directly with departments to help them get their data transformed and loaded into the platform, then we were able to work with them to visualize their goals and outcome measures using Socrata Perspectives and Socrata Open Performance.
What was the outcome, and how did that achievement advance your organizational goals?
Our primary goal for this project was to foster a culture of openness and transparency among our great folks working in strategic performance management at the State of Michigan. Our performance dashboards achieved that goal, and continue to perform well to this day.
The first dashboard was the MiDashboard, built in 2014 to showcase the governor's performance priorities for eight subject areas. This dashboard was updated again in 2018 and became the Path Toward Our Future dashboard, which displayed the most up-to-date information about Michigan's work to improve our economy, communities, government, education and infrastructure. Since the Path Toward Our Future dashboard was launched in January 2018, it had been visited by 12,724 unique individuals who have viewed 59,211 pages. Our engagement numbers exceeded our goals, and we are very proud of the outcomes we have achieved with the Path Toward Our Future project. Since then, the state is undergoing a new initiative to launch a performance dashboard using Socrata Connected Government Cloud.
How can your approach benefit peers using Tyler products and services?
We feel that our solution provides a great example of what can be accomplished by working cross-agency to collaboratively build a high-quality and useful Open Performance project. Since we began using Socrata products, we have continuously tried to push the envelope and work with Socrata to use as much functionality of the product that we can. We're so proud to be a part of the community, and we're very excited for all of the great work to come!